I am not one for measuring ingredients when I am cooking – Italians call this method of cooking all’ occhio,( occhio is an eye) that is, I use my eyes and roughly culculate the weights and measures of what I want and employ all my senses (except hearing) to proceed with the preparation and cooking.

These mushrooms were huge! The largest was 19 cm across – perfect for stuffing and baking.

They were very easy to prepare and to cook! No scraping of the brown underside (unless damaged), no peeling of the mushroom skin (many people peel mushrooms) or pre-cooking any of the ingredients used in the stuffing (many use sautéed onion and the stalks of the mushroom in the stuffing) .

As you can see I stuffed four mushrooms and I used about:
1 cup of fresh breadcrumbs (made with 1-2 day old good quality bread)
2 cloves garlic, crushed and finely chopped,
2 tablespoons chopped fresh parsley
4 tablespoons pine nuts
1/3 cup of extra virgin olive oil
salt and freshly ground black pepper

Wipe clean or wash mushrooms (depending on how dirty they are) and trim ends of stems.
Heat oven to 180- 200°.
Drizzle olive oil on a baking dish large enough to hold the mushrooms in a single layer.
Combine together the bread crumbs, parsley, garlic, pine nuts, salt and pepper and a big glug of the oil.
Drizzle a little of the olive oil over each mushroom cap.
Fill the mushroom caps with the stuffing.
Drizzle more olive oil over the filling of each mushroom.
Bake until you can smell that they are ready – use your senses – and the filling looks golden on top. Mine took about 20 minutes to cook.
Eat them hot or cold – both good.

Variation: add grated Parmesan cheese to the stuffing mixture.

I feel strongly about eating balanced meals so as a main meal I accompanied them with a salad of green beans, feta, walnuts, egg mayonnaise and pears.